Major American corporations are pressing the Treasury Department to rewrite tax rules so they can claim bigger foreign tax credits and shelter more profits offshore — while working Americans pay full freight on every paycheck.

The Working Group for Competitive International Taxation — a lobbying coalition that includes Microsoft, American Express, AIG, and Valero, among others — asked Treasury and the IRS to let businesses elect to limit how overall domestic losses reduce their foreign earned income, according to Bloomberg Tax News. That election would let companies pick and choose which losses count, maximizing the foreign tax credits they can claim under new expense allocation rules from the 2025 Republican tax law. The practical effect: corporations pay less U.S. tax on money earned overseas by crediting foreign taxes paid, while domestic losses are quarantined so they don't eat into those credits.

Follow the money. Foreign tax credits exist to prevent double taxation — in theory. In practice, they've become a tool for multinational corporations to offshore profits and shrink their U.S. tax bill. The 2025 tax law's expense allocation rules changed how certain costs get allocated between domestic and foreign income, and these companies now argue the rules unintentionally reduce their foreign tax credits. Their fix: an election that lets them disregard some domestic losses when calculating foreign income. It's a one-way ratchet — losses only reduce U.S. taxable income, not the foreign side.

Bloomberg Tax News reported the details of the lobbying push straight. The New York Times, meanwhile, didn't cover this story at all — it was occupied with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's public feud with the Commerce Department over sanctions enforcement against a Singaporean firm called Megaspeed, and the Nvidia CEO's resignation over an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence flagged as a Chinese government asset. That's a legitimate national security story. But the Times had nothing to say about a coalition of Fortune 500 companies quietly lobbying Treasury for offshore tax relief — the kind of permanent Washington game that usually flies under the radar.

The Working Group's members span finance, tech, and energy — American International Group, American Express, Microsoft, Valero, and nine others Bloomberg didn't name. These are companies with the resources to hire the former officials and connected lobbyists who know how to get Treasury's ear. No revolving door details were disclosed in either outlet's reporting, but the pattern is familiar: regulated entities seeking regulatory relief from the agencies that write the rules, through coalitions with innocuous-sounding names.

The core tension: every dollar of foreign tax credit claimed is a dollar the U.S. Treasury doesn't collect — which means somebody else makes up the difference, or the deficit grows. That somebody is the W-2 earner who can't elect to disregard losses or shift income offshore. The 2025 tax law was sold as pro-growth. Whether it becomes a vehicle for multinationals to further insulate foreign earnings from U.S. tax depends on what Treasury does with requests like this one.

Treasury hasn't responded publicly. The question is whether it writes rules for the companies asking — or for the country that's supposed to come first.